A
[2019·安徽蚌埠二中高一期中]Learning Chinese could be one of the most important decisions you ever make. Chinese is becoming the language to learn in the 21st century. With the world's largest population and a rapidly growing middle class, China stands to become the engine of the world's economy in the coming years. This will make learning Chinese very important for people in many industries, or for those of us who wish to visit China or learn from its culture and history.
There is an ongoing effort to modernize the writing system and standardize the language. An increasing number of people learning Chinese are learning Mandarin, so unless you absolutely need to learn another dialect (such as Cantonese), be sure you are studying Mandarin.
For native English speakers, Chinese is one of the most difficult and most different languages to learn. The vocabulary is wholly unfamiliar and unlike anything we know. In addition, in the Chinese tone system, words are spoken in rising or falling tones, which help to tell between them. Furthermore, there is the Chinese writing system — a collection of thousands of individual ideograms (表意文字), or symbols, which stand for a word or an idea. These ideograms have no phonetic value — that is to say, we can't tell how the word is pronounced by how it is written. There is a method to present written Chinese in a phonetic script called pinyin. If you are learning Chinese, you'll be working with this pinyin system, but the beauty of the traditional writing system shouldn't be passed up. All these factors make learning Chinese difficult for us. Yet, for a determined learner, there's always a way to overcome it.
【语篇解读】 本文是一篇说明文，主要讲了世界上越来越多的人学汉语，以及汉语难学的原因。
21．Learning Chinese is becoming more and more important, because ________.
A．Chinese engines are very welcome
B．China has the world's largest population
C．there are more and more rich people in China
D．China has become important to the world's economy
答案与解析：D 细节理解题。根据第一段中的“...China stands to become the engine of the world's economy in the coming years. This will make learning Chinese very important...”可知，越来越多的人学汉语是因为中国在世界经济中起重要的作用，故答案为D。
22．From the text we can learn that ________.
A．the author thinks Chinese is as difficult as English
B．the author is interested in Chinese and China's culture
C．foreign languages can play a great role in industrial development
D．as long as the pinyin system is learned well, one can learn Chinese well
答案与解析：B 细节理解题。根据第一段中的“for those of us who wish to visit China or learn from its culture and history”可知，作者对汉语和中国的文化很感兴趣，故答案为B。
23．The last paragraph mainly tells us about ________.
A．the difficulties of learning Chinese
B．the advantages of learning Chinese
C．the Chinese tone system
D．the Chinese writing system
答案与解析：A 推理判断题。根据最后一段中的倒数第二句“All these factors make learning Chinese difficult for us.”可知，最后一段讲学汉语的困难，故答案为A。
